"I'm much too young to feel this damned old." Garth Brooks

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Meditating the 60 Blog

I meditate. I burn candles. I drink green tea, and I still want to smack some people.

At my class last night, we practiced about ten minutes of mindfulness meditation. We learned about self-compassion. Be kind to yourself. Treat yourself with love, care, dignity and make your well-being a priority. “With self-compassion, we still hold ourselves accountable professionally and personally, but there are no toxic emotions inflicted upon and towards ourselves.”

How often do you think negative thoughts about yourself? “I’ll never get that job.” “I’m a loser.” “Why can’t I lose five more pounds?” “I can never do anything right.” Don’t forget, the body does what the mind tells it to do. Clark Moutsakas said “Accept everything about yourself–I mean everything. You are you and that is the beginning and the end. No apologies.”

It’s hard to do. I have been suffering with negative self-talk for years, and I’m working on doing away with that negativity when I realize it’s happening. I listened to a ten-minute guided meditation this morning and some of the thoughts I’m trying to repeat to myself every day are:

Your true self is simple goodness at this moment.

When I love and accept myself, I can love and accept others.

I am at peace with myself.

Kristin Neff, author of Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind, states: “It becomes understood that happiness is not dependent on circumstances being exactly as we want them to be, or on ourselves being exactly as we’d like to be. Rather, happiness stems from loving ourselves and our lives exactly as they are, knowing that joy and pain, strength and weakness, glory and failure are all essential to the full human experience.”